Heaven's Gate (film) - Versions

Versions

Heaven's Gate premiered in New York on November 19, 1980. Prior to the premiere, Cimino had rushed through post-production and editing in order to meet his contractual requirements to United Artists and to qualify for the 1980 Academy Awards. The version screened at the premiere ran 219 minutes. Kristofferson joked that Cimino had worked on the film so close to the premiere that the print screened was still wet from the lab.

After the aborted one-week run in New York, Cimino and United Artists pulled Heaven's Gate; Cimino wrote an open letter to the studio that was printed in several trade papers blaming unrealistic deadline pressures for the film's failure. United Artists reportedly also hired its own editor to try to edit Cimino's footage into a releasable film. Ultimately, Cimino's 149-minute version premiered in April 1981 and was the only cut of the film screened in wide release. This cut of the film is not just shorter but differs radically in placement of scenes and selection of takes.

In 1982, Z Channel aired the 219-minute premiere version of Heaven's Gate on cable television – the first time that the longer version was widely exhibited – which Z Channel dubbed the "director's cut." As critic F.X. Feeney noted, Z Channel's broadcast of Heaven's Gate first popularized the concept of a "director's cut."

When MGM (which acquired the rights to United Artists's catalog after its demise) released Heaven's Gate on VHS and videodisc in the 1980s, it released Cimino's 219-minute cut with the tagline "Heaven's Gate… The Legendary Uncut Version." Subsequent releases on LaserDisc and DVD have contained only the 219-minute cut. The 149-minute cut has never been released on home video in the United States.

In 2005, MGM released Heaven's Gate in selected cinemas in the United States and Europe. The 219-minute cut had to be reassembled by MGM archivist John Kirk, who reported that large portions of the original negative had been discarded. The restored print was screened in Paris and presented to a sold-out audience at New York's Museum of Modern Art with a live introduction by Isabelle Huppert. Nevertheless, because the project was commissioned by then-MGM executive Bingham Ray, who was ousted shortly thereafter, the budget for the project was cut and a planned wider release and DVD never materialized.

Notwithstanding the wide availability of the 219-minute premiere version of Heaven's Gate and its frequent labeling as "uncut" or the "director's cut," "Cimino insisted that the so-called original version did not fully correspond to his intentions, that he was under pressure to bring it out for the predetermined date and did not consider ready," making even the 219-minute version essentially an unfinished film.

A restored, 216-minute version of the film premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2012 as part of the Venice Classics series. The Criterion Collection has released the restored version on Blu-ray Disc and DVD on November 20, 2012.